The Cosmo-Local Plan for our Next Civilization

Towards a convergence of the local bioregional resilient production efforts with the global coordination and 'Capital for the Commons' capacities of Web3

< To put it bluntly, Web3 and the crypto economy is still largely an ‘exit’ play for financial and coding elites, practicing the arbitrage of nation-states, but without much connections to local communities and resilient production; Similarly, local communities engaged in relocalized and regenerative production are not in sync with the mutual coordination capacities developed in the crypto/web3 context. >

In this article I want to summarize the specificity of the cosmo-local approach to the present and future of human civilization. Cosmo-localism is a third option, next to the two great competing options of the Western ‘mercantile’ world order and the neo-sovereignist alternatives that are based on a renewed control of associated nation-states. In these two options, the digital is merely used to reinforce existing logics of power and control; in cosmo-localism, the digital is used to fundamentally reorganize the world order.

So let us first define what we mean by adding these two contradictory terms together: the local and the cosmic.

Cosmo-localism is an approach that aims to combine resilient and regenerative forms of localized production, closer to demand, but combined with access to globally shared knowledge commons, translocal protocols of cooperation, and access to forms of capital that are compatible with commons-oriented approaches to local production. Each of the three elements of this definition is an important characteristic.

It is sometimes summarized with the adage:

· What is heavy should be local, and what is light should be global and shared.

Why is this a desirable goal ?

- The current global system of production and trade is reported to use three times more of its resource use for transport, not for making. This creates a profound ‘ecological’, i.e. biophysical and thermodynamic, rationale for relocalizing production

- The current system of production is based on mass production, and requires the constant creation of new desires and needs, which need to be created through advertising, and require massive forms of potentially unnecessary material production

- The current system is ‘closed source’, and is carried out by competitive agents that do not share innovations for very long time periods; the competitiveness of these agents requires behaviors that externalize costs to the public and the state institutions

- There is also a ‘temporal’ element to this analysis: we are no longer in a period of non-problematic globalization, but in a chaotic transition with increased and potentially violent competition for scarcifying resources, which requires de-risking supply chains.

A cosmo-local approach has obvious advantages in this context:

- Relocalizing production saves a sizeable amount of matter and energy

- Production on demand can eliminate the huge impetus to create artificial needs and desires

- If we add open source knowledge, this means that any innovation anywhere in the common network, is instantly available to every node in the network ; this means that the switch in growth from towards exclusive efficiency, towards a balance between efficiency and resilience, can be accelerated. This is what we have called ‘True Accelerationism’.

- In addition, adding mutualizing forms of governance and ownership, can also have extraordinary effects on the amount of needed energy and materials. For example, in the context of shared transport, one shared car can replace 9 to 13 private cars, without any loss of mobility. A ‘factor 20’ movement can be imagined, in fact, already exists, which aims to reduce energy usage by 95%, coupled with significant savings in the use of materials. This movement is already active in various European cities.

The current techno-logical conditions make such a shift eminently imaginable, and technically feasible, although there are still huge social and political obstacles in the way of such a shift.

On the positive side of the ledger:

· Open source technology, now responsible for 80% of all used software, in the form of free software, shared knowledge, and open designs, creates the capacity to share knowledge and experience over networks, rapid collective learning, and accelerated innovation

· Web3 and crypto have created the capacity to fund shared infrastructures in open eco-systems, through processes such as public goods funding; other advances in funding make it possible to move towards bioregional regenerative funding ecosystems

· Maker technology, including advances in 3D printing, make it possible to move towards distributed manufacturing, using a ‘on demand’ logic of production

· Advances in regenerative practices, such as the circular economy, biomimicry, biodegradable materials, make more sustainable production realistic. This includes new paradigms of productive organization, such as the ‘mycelium’ paradigm which has a certain popularity in the Web3 movement.

· The blockchain, as universal ledger, creates a vast capacity for translocal coordination, and creates a new fourth sector model of ‘organized networks based on common infrastructure’

· A culture of translocal cooperation and mutual learning has been created, creating capacities for digital nomads for being the catalysts for translocal production alliances. With catalyst, I do not necessarily mean they are the founders and creators, but that they play vital roles as facilitators between the various locales. Imagine a global coalition between bioregional guilds rooted in the resilient production of their locales, aided and abetted by the more collective ‘cosmic’ knowledge of the appropriate ‘cosmic’ guilds.

· Millions of people have turned to mutualized, regenerative and resilient local production and consumption practices, in all domains of production

It may be be useful to distinguish the ‘players’ that we see involved in such a transformation:

· The localist initiators; these are the locally rooted people who express their concern with local supply chains and take local initiatives to remedy the problems that they are seeing, or acting out value choices

· The nomadic elements. Elsewhere, I have distinguished between two potential kinds of ‘nomadic’ players:

o The ‘Nowheres’: these are nomads that are seeking the best options amongst locales, bound to their own agendas only, and arbitraging between nation-states and places. This may be seen as an unsustainable exit strategy, and carries certain dangers. One of them is the perception of parasitical or exploitative activity. A certain ‘rootlessness’ may be attached to this form of human identity.

o The Everywheres are on the contrary nomadic elements that are willing to be of service to cosmo-local productive economic alliances, seeding various locales with the trans-local experience, both of other locales they may have visited, but also of the network itself.

o It is possible to imagine the interplay in the form of two different complementary guilds; While the ‘bioregional’ and local guilds consists of the players who focus on their local geographic role, as part of a local productive economy; the translocal guilds organizes the nomadic members of the network.

· The third important players are the providers of ‘capital for the commons’. In the new cosmo-local paradigm, one can distinguish different ‘economic players’ as well:

o The ‘open source’ contributors, are all those that contribute, in one way or another, to the shared knowledge necessary for the productive project to succeed

o The entrepreneurs, or as we would like to call them, the ‘entredonneurs’. These are all those that add value to the open source common base, and create ‘value for the market’. However, they are all co-dependent on the common pool. This is why the moniker of ‘entredonneur’ makes sense, as they are not merely extracting for their own benefit and profit, but realizing that their success depends on their common advantages through their networked production community. The search is on for the transformation of the more extractive forms of ownership, to more generative forms of property, in which there is more of balance between the market players and the commons they are interdependent with.

o In that context, it is important to acknowledge that the new economic institution is not just a corporation, or even a ‘cooperative’, but an ‘organized network with commons’. Like the example of the DAO, this is a ‘meta-container’ that can organize at a higher level of integration, non-market (permissionless contributions), market (commodity-based value), but also public players.

o But all of these arrangements also need capital inflows, but a particular kind of capital that is compatible with the development of commons-based networks.

Elsewhere, we have provided a ‘global history of regulation’, which indicates the systemic characteristics that the new system must have.

The essential and simplified of regulation would be the following:

· a long period of participation of the human in the natural world, without specific protective institutions

· the organized societies of the classical civilization period, in which the Empire or the Monarchy, or even the Trading State, would limit the power of the markets to disrupt organized society. In this model, the local protective capacity of the local commons was largely respected.

· The capital-state-nation model of the modern period, in which the state is supposed to regulate the market, and subjected to the political ebb and flow of market, state and social power blocs.

· The globalization period since the 1980s, in which transnational financial forces have surpassed the capacity of state forces to regulate them.

In this context, the cosmo-local option is not focused neither on a belief in the total self-regulation of market forces (including in the form of multistakeholder governance alliances as proposed by the WEF ideology), nor just a neo-sovereignist restoration of the inter-nation state system, but on something novel: the creation of a new type of commons-based regulatory mechanism that can operate on a global level.

In the short term, the cosmo-local option and strategy is concerned with translocally strengthening alliances of locally-oriented regenerative production.

The goal to be imagined is the following:

· On the local level we have the existence of allied local productive actors which can be organized around specific functional domains of activity (say the various provisioning systems), or perhaps, alliances of complementary local production initiatives, which may seek transnational support and strength, but most importantly translocal capital. The historical precedent for this, have been called ‘Neo-Venetian Networks’ or ‘Phyles’ by David de Ugarte. In an earlier article on this substack, I have described the entanglement of local and transnational capital in the Maronite communities of Northern Lebanon, while I have also described the local affinity based funding scheme experimented by Hugo Mathecowitsch in Honduras and Brazil. Traditional surviving kinship-based solidarity models are now supplemented by affinity-based neo-tribes that share a common social object in the commons they are mutually dependent on.

· On the trans-local level, we must imagine productive alliances organizing the joint knowledge commons, their protocols of cooperation, collective learning, collective management of jointly held resources.

· The local units have the capacity to invest and co-own the translocal resources of the alliances and commons they belong to; the trans-national alliances have the capacity to direct investment to the local units, and perhaps co-own some part of it. The idea here is a potential ‘entanglement’ between the local and the translocal level, which creates new levels of strength and capacity for the local.

· Hence, faced with the potential hostility of nation-states that are under the influence of extractive forces of trans-national finance, the local is no longer just the local, but a local that is also cosmo-local, and can mobilize counter-power.

In our vision, this counter-power is the characteristic of a transitional moment or epoch, but culminates in a commons-centric cosmo-local form of civilization, in which these protective commons institutions create the necessary balance within which market forces and territorial administrations can continue to exist, but without their capacity for over-reach in terms of thermo-dynamic balance.

It is to be stressed that this Cosmo-Localism is not at the outset a monolithic political or societal project, it is not inherently antagonistic to the nation-state; the question of development of these networks and alliances can have a pragmatic character:

· In which circumstance is it best to envisage trans-local alliances that are linked to the functional domain of a particular provisioning system ?

· In which circumstance is it best to envisage a cross-functional alliance ?

Cosmo-localism is compatible with functional city alliances that bypass nation-state levels of organization (for example, say a trans-local city league of FairBnB’s), but it is also compatible with a bioregional reorganization of the physical-productive world, in which bioregionalization is facilitated by the historical and political unifying tradition of the nation-state.

What is crucial in the cosmo-local option is some form of new integration of:

· Reinforced local and functional differentialism; in contrast with the purely standardizing commercial globalization model, it must leave more room for differentialist specificity, which can be both a localist feature (bioregional identity), a trans-local cultural identity (a diasporic project), but also a functional differentiation, i.e. a value based solution for a particular provisioning system.

· Reinforced planetary care: localism on its own cannot resist globalized pressure, nor solve planetary and global thermo-dynamic issues.

Cosmo-localism attempts a difficult ‘unity of opposites’, which recognizes both local and functional autonomy (the latter is called Sphere Sovereignty, and can be traced to Althussius, the alternative to Hobbesian absolute ‘sovereignty’) and the need for higher levels of unity and coordination. The cosmo-local option rejects any ‘absolute’ form of sovereignty, and opts preferentially for distributed forms of governance.

It is important to recap what Web3 has already brought to the table in this context:

· A capacity to globally coordinate human labor and fund it

· A universal ledger which can create open ecosystems for non-local coordination, with new accounting systems for contributory labor, 3D systems flow, and thermo-dynamic flow

· Programmable currencies which can represent various value options.

· The capacity to fund its own commons-based infrastructures, i.e. public funding, and even retroactive public funding

· Anti-oligarchic, ‘timocratic’ coordination and decision-making mechanisms, such as quadratic voting, and other new capacities to align incentives between various stakeholders. In Web3, both capital and labor, and other productive factors and forces, can be interpreted and treated as contributions to a common project.

All these techno-social trends are very much underway already.

There are however, also serious obstacles:

· Crypto and impact funding are not finding their way to relocalized and translocal production ecosystems; and are at this stage, hardly involved in real physical production.

· Local commons and digital nomads are not well connected at the present time.

· Local commoners frequently are solely concerned with their local situation, remain small and weak, and do not scale, nor accrue sufficient social and financial power, they remain marginal options.

To put it bluntly, Web3 and the crypto economy is still largely an ‘exit’ play for financial and coding elites, practicing the arbitrage of nation-states, but without much connections to local communities and resilient production; Similarly, local communities engaged in relocalized and regenerative production are not in sync with the mutual coordination capacities developed in the crypto/web3 context.

On the one hand, we have a thriving and well-funded field of Web3 technologies, unconnected and unrelated to actual physical production; on the other hand, we have an explosion of underfunded local production.

To achieve the next great civilizational advance, towards a cosmo-local world order, we will need to bring those two worlds together!